Introducing a new BikePortland resource: the Advocacy Calendar

Since the start of BikePortland 20 years ago, one of my goals has been to empower everyone to be a stronger advocate. A community is at its best when information and power is held by a wide cross-section of people and not hoarded (intentionally or not) by professional advocates, the media, elected officials or agency staff. The mantra I say to myself a lot is, “No one can f*** with people who are informed and inspired,” — that’s my version of the trite but true, “knowledge is power” metaphor.

This is a long way of introducing the latest BikePortland resource: the Advocacy Calendar. As the name implies, this calendar is focused squarely on advocacy-related events. I’m talking about advisory committee meetings, project open houses, wonky events hosted by nonprofits, and so on. I track a bunch of these meetings already in order stay in front of the news and better understand the projects, policies, and people behind them. Now I’m sharing my personal calendar with you in hopes that we get more folks engaged and involved in important issues.

Because now more than ever, we must lean into the power that resides in every one of us to do our homework, pay attention, and to hold government and large organizations accountable.

This calendar will feature events you won’t find on the Shift Calendar, which focuses more on “bike fun” and social rides (please don’t lecture me on how fun rides are also advocacy, that’s literally the foundation of my work and I get it). (The only time I’ll post a fun event ride is when it’s part of a paid promotional campaign. You’ll also see Bike Happy Hour on this calendar, because that’s an event I manage.)

The events you’ll find on this calendar are where ideas are planted, decisions are made, projects are first shared and policy ideas are vetted.

So far in July I’ve posted nearly 20 events (and I’ve got more coming) from city, county, and state agencies. On the individual event pages, I include a description of the agency/group hosting the event and put links to meeting agendas, websites, and so on.

Steve (Bozzone, my trusty web design guy) and I will likely be tweaking things here and there for a while, so if you see something that needs to be fixed or have a change to suggest, please let me know.

I hope you find this calendar useful. And maybe you’ll consider showing up to a meeting or event you wouldn’t otherwise check out and maybe some of you will join one of these committees the next time they recruit. I know they could use folks like you, and the more eyes our community has on these agendas and conversations, the less likely it is that bad things will happen to us. Nothing about us, without us, right?

— BikePortland Advocacy Calendar